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Sunday, March 27, 2011

Here's the Argus C3 aka the backup plan for the Brownie Reflex. According to this, my Argus was made in 1950.

I used both the Brownie Reflex and the Argus last weekend in Vegas. The Brownie Reflex is a simple point and shoot situation, whereas the Argus requires focusing through the rangefinder and determining the shutter speed and aperture setting.

I'm so used to taking a ton of pictures with my digital camera and then deleting the bad ones later, that I wasn't totally prepared for considering each shot carefully to decide whether or not it was worthy of an exposure. This was especially true with the Brownie Reflex. Getting that 35mm film spooled onto the 127 spool was a hell of a lot of work, so I wanted to make sure every shot counted. But even when I did decide something was worth it, it often lost its punch when I looked through the viewfinder (Brownie) or rangefinder (Argus). The end result is that I ended up not taking a lot of pictures in Vegas.

In terms of getting this film developed- I'm keeping the bar really low by expecting 2 rolls of nothing. It's just that there are any number of things that could have gone wrong along the way. Maybe I mangled the 35mm film when spooling it onto the 127 spool; I used all the wrong settings on the Argus; the cameras aren't working properly. But no matter what, it's an adventure and I'm antsy to get this film developed. It stopped raining today and we had some radical clouds--

-- so I took the cameras out to snap off the rest of the film. Then it was back into the changing bag with the Brownie for phase II of dealing with the film. When you get to the end of the roll, you have to spool the 35mm film off of the 127 spool & back into the 35mm canister it came from. This is a challenge, but not nearly as tricky as phase I. You use a bottle opener to lift the lid off the 35mm canister (very carefully. you don't want to mess up the rim because you have to crimp that lid back onto the canister after you get the film spooled back in).